


Other echoes inhabit the garden

by zambla



Category: Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
Genre: Character Study, Detroit, Gen, History, Italy, London, Mathematics, Tangier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2014-06-01
Packaged: 2018-01-27 20:36:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1721762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zambla/pseuds/zambla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eve—she enters and exists the histories of men like an albatross in the northern oceans—preening her wings after centuries of wandering.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Other echoes inhabit the garden

-

**Detroit, 2011**

He drives from Chicago on 94 east. The midwest summer is a fine skin, a warm gauzy night. Signs rush past him like silver birds pushed through the air: DETROIT CITY LIMITS / CORKTOWN NEXT 5 EXITS / BRIDGE TO CANADA / TUNNEL TO CANADA. When he exists near the park under the abandoned train building some kids are having a rave in a warehouse. Octave One, Jeff Mills, Parliament, bright lattices of notes, unrelentingly glide through the low-pass filter of the pavement. He drives on. The rhythm: the bass and the silence together, stick to the inside of his skull like wax. Techno, Adam thinks to himself, another stolen black music.

-

**Tangier**

Eve is not her first name. It is not that she has forgotten her first name, or in fact her second. But Eve— _Hawwah_ , the living—has a delicious, palindromic symmetry.

When she returns to Tangier in the late summer of 1591, she has to pay the ferryman in Algeciras against all his superstitious instincts to set sail at night.

The Rock seems to bob in the waves—a jagged stone floating in the woven darkness. Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, all mix like wine in the dark sea. She's dressed like a young Spaniard, a tunic, waistcoat, trousers, perhaps some other affects of the time, speaking in the courtly manner, her language and prosody as precisely dictated by _Gramática de la lengua castellan_. She and the shipmaster trade silences. The waves are a glittering surface; the moon is a salty mirror on the Strait. The ship pulls into the harbor. Tangier glows, sloping against its own light. What a world. All these lives.

She has not been in Tangier since the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire. The city is larger, fuller. She walks in the medina at night, under the awning sky, her feet teaching her the familiar paths as she tries to remember all the lives she'd known here. Women carrying food, old men sitting at tables playing chess, smoking from their _sebsi_ well into the night. The sumptuous smell of fish, sweet dates, and warm hashish.

In the north there is plague. In the south she is too conspicuous. But in Tangier she can be as she needs to be, morphing between tongues, between genders, between desires. In Tangier the east and the west, the north and the south, come together like the languid limbs of fishermen's daughters, tangling in love and friendship under the brazen August night. She drinks in their green want, their green trees.

The salty moon tastes like the salty sea. The salty sea tastes like the salty blood. The salty blood is richly green, swollen with want. Let the humans have their war, their religions, their belligerents and conquerors. For her all but maps, words, and blood.

-

The next time Eve comes back to Tangier it is the year of failed revolutions. Barricades litter the streets in the cities of Europe The young are executed. The old are exiled. Famine everywhere. Giuseppe Garibaldi, hot-blooded in the withering summer of 1849, defeated in Le Guerra di indipendenza italiana, defeated in his vision of an unified, unconquered Italy, defeated in his lofty republican dreams, arrives at the port of Tangier with nothing but his personal affects and a death warrant over his head. He is soon _besotted_ with Eve, whom he meets at a party given by the British Consul. She finds him beautifully spoken but a terrible dancer. They meet in _cafes_ in the evenings. He despairs over the future. He contemplates permanent exile. No, you need to go back to Italy, she tells him: Your country needs you. She takes his hands and kisses him. Go, my friend, go to your home.

But Eve—she enters and exists the histories of men like an albatross in the northern oceans—preening her wings after centuries of wandering.

-

**Firenze, 1482**

In Botticelli's _Pallas and the Centaur_ she is wreathed in vine and gold. She untucks her hair from its plait for him, and lays it about her shoulders. "It looks as if I will behead him," she says, looking at the under sketch of her hand twisted over the centaur, her other hand holding the halberd in a grip. "Maybe you shall," says Sandro, mysteriously grinning. "Would that truth and beauty could triumph over all beasts."

But Michelangelo de Caravaggio (whom a century later she meets via Francesco Maria del Monte, who in turn she knew from the Medici circles) with puffy, hungover eyes, paints her as Judith, at the bloody climax of it all. They work at night in the dark studio because vampires and artists alike cannot abide in the harsh daylight. Michelangelo seems to have intuited her from the beginning. He has her sitting for a week for the pose—her fingers twisted on the knife, the other hand holding down the severing head, her own head recoiling, the horror of it a sheen on her face. "Light," she says to him, "is the sickly medium by which we discover both the divine and the monstrous."

And she is right. _Gaudi_ , she would later say, walking hand in hand with Kit in Barcelona at the turn of another century, _he had visions of Botticelli in everything_ _. But to see Caravaggio, you needn't have visions_.

-

**Roma, 1641**

They are sitting in the candle light. Adam's hair is long, as is the fashion, kept back in a black linen hat. Beside him sits a man, Evangelista Torricelli, who gently gestures over the stack of papers laid before them. They are drinking diluted wine. The house is quiet, save for the occasional rustle of a servant who tends the fire down the hall, or the wet nurse corralling the children back to sleep.

On the paper are drawn two gentle sloping curves, symmetrically tapering upwards into a suggested infinity. Evangelista explains fervently, almost gleefully: a trumpet constructed of a rotating hyperbolic line, infinitely long, tapering in width as it gains in length. His hand follows the logic down the paper: to obtain the volume of the object involves the limit of an infinite sum (though not yet in those words):

"See, if we followed Cavalieri's _method of indivisibles_ , we arrive at an astonishing conclusion. That though the extent of the object is infinite, it must have a finite volume. Is this not a miracle, my friend?"

His fingers sweep up and down the proof—the intersections are borne out, the lines criss-crossing the paper like an instruction for dance. An finite containment of an infinite nature. Adam pictures the trumpet as they're discussing it, how it would have to taper onwards, diminishing precisely at a fast enough rate as to escape infinity.

It is _brilliant_. Adam trembles in the beauty of it, the absolute beauty of it.

The candle flickers its tender light. It is as if an angel is in the room.

Adam stands up. He traces his fingers on the leather spines of the texts on the well-stocked shelf, pacing slowly among the volumes. Finally he picks up a small, well-thumbed book on the desk. He flips through the smooth vellum, and whispers, almost to himself, his voice as luminous as the scribe's precise, textured hand: _Et septimus Angelus tuba cecinit: et factæ sunt voces magnæ in cælo dicentes: Factum est regnum huius mundi, Domini nostri et Christi eius, et regnabit in sæcula sæculorum: Amen._

Gabriel's horn.

 

-

**London, 1588**

It was not she who turned Adam, but another man. He found Adam in London, the second son of a minor country gentleman, wandering in the poor quarters and losing his money to dice and sack. He had been tellingly musical. Instantly Adam knew that he was old—very old. Adam himself had been a promising young musician—had in fact pupilled with William Byrd for some years before money and circumstance (and Byrd's increasing Catholicism) barred him from music. Adam supposes that he recognized in himself the melancholy and desire, uneasily mixed like a volatile drink.

He died some years later during the Thirty Year's War in the siege of La Rochelle, drinking out of desperation from diseased bodies, rotting away by the end of winter.

-

**Venezia, 1644**

Adam meets Eve on a quiet evening in Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia in 1644.

She's dressed as a young man—it's easier to travel alone this way. They greet each other on the flagstone street with a nod on both sides, uncurling their curious sideways glances into each other's gaze. Adam stops in his step. Eve walks smoothly on, her cropped flaxen hair weaving curiously about her.

Her face is like the luminous sunlight of his memories.

They meet again a week later. She greets him in beautiful English: "How, my friend." He is cautiously silent. She extends a gloved hand toward him. White kidskin. He kisses it.

-

**Paris, 1923**

Eve acquires books through a book dealer in _la rive gauche_. Mlle. Beach, an elegant woman of fashionable dress, speaking in her half-wild half-tame Anglo-American, daily from morning to dusk tabulates and tends to her constellation of antique and esoteric volumes. In the summer of '23, she lends Eve a rare edition of Baudelaire's _Les Épaves_ , a small collection of Donne, and _A human document_ , a strange little novel by a strange little Englishman named W. H. Mallock. An Irishman named Jim, a regular and somewhat known writer, asks her why he only see her in the evenings. "I've nothing to contribute to the glory of the daytime," she says, and adjusts the brim of her hat. "But you can buy me some wine."

That evening Eve returns to her apartment on _rue de l'Odéon_ and opens her copy of _Paradise Lost_. She reads it like this: first the beginning, second the ending. Then she reads towards the center in a pair of progressing fronts, one forward, one backwards. She finds the symmetric middle of everything.

-

**2001**

At some point in her life Eve realizes that she could understand history by touch.

At first it is only simple facts. Its make. Its materials. When she lays her forefinger on the supple sash of her dress she can feel the beautiful flax fields, the summer sun, an autumn scythe, spinster's fingers on the thread, a seamstress's hands. Then, through flashes and snatches, she begins to understand more complex information—the river of ownership from one era to another, being rent and mended for a duchess in the early 1700s, passing to a beloved maid as it comes out of fashion. Then passing from mother to daughter to shopkeepers, until Eve sees it one evening in London, 1818.

"Dearest Adam," she writes. He has already left London. "I am beginning to understand objects simply through touch." It is somewhat difficult to contact Adam who lives now in a mansion in Geneva, planning further travel with his merry band of Cantabrigian poets. "That is wondrous," he write back a month later. "I have some choice instruments that I would love for you to date."

They keep correspondence sometimes through public post but sometimes only through trusted couriers. Their messages are full of tenderness and jokes.

Eventually, when the wars had come and gone, Eve finds that she has to wear gloves to go anywhere. The objects gain more and more information, more and more emotions. It is why she left Germany in the 70s—in West Berlin she can't touch any of the stones of Berliner Dom without seeing the whistling descent of the Allies bombs, the blast burying two boys until they asphyxiated on the dust. She sits down on the steps and cries into her hands.

All the jewelry she finds in Germany has the cries of the Jews burned into them like a brand.

-

"War," she says to Kit after she fled to Paris, "it is such a relentless beast. It lives in _everything_."

"But war is only the final flower of an evil tree," Kit says calmly as he pours her another glass of wine.

"Yes, Berty Russell. Adam would enjoy that."

"Would he? I thought he only liked the company of poets and musicians."

"No, he's quite keen on mathematicians and scientists, too."

"Oh _really_."

"Yes. Quite."

They sit in the quiet awning of the _brasserie_ , drinking the wine which they cannot taste, but out of custom and novelty continue to sip.

"You know, not two blocks from here I used to drink wine with James Joyce," Eve says suddenly.

"Oh he was a _wonderful_ writer."

"Yes he was." Eve puts on her shades. "He really was. I used to ask him to summarize to me the history of the Irish in as few words as possible. _The cracked lookingglass of a servant_ , he once said. You know, he told me the dirtiest jokes—I think he thought I was a prostitute." She pauses. "Kit—I'm afraid I'm becoming frightfully bored of Paris. Do you want to go somewhere?"

"Where to, mistress mine?"

"Oh, I don't know. I think I'd like to see Morocco again. I want to see the moon glittering on the Strait of Gibraltar."

They pay their bill and head to Eve's apartment. They climb from the balcony onto the roof. Paris is cluttered and gray. They stay to watch the lights drown out the stars, and the moon is not seen, and the sun does not rise.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Eliot's "Burnt Norton," which is in turn used by Edward Said in "Culture & Imperialism" to describe the way separate cultures could gain from each other by true and sympathetic interaction instead of art that seeks to reinforce otherness.


End file.
